'Have you become a Maroccan?'

Marion is one of the Dutch converts interviewed by Janina Pighat in her documentary 'Delfts Blaw Meets Hijab'. You can read more about this project on its blog .

The Romanian Headscarf. A Metonymy

You see it on the street, assuming that it belongs to  an Arabian student. But it sometimes conceals the hair of a Romanian convert, the typical representative of a new emergent religious community in Romania.

Conversion to Islam is a highly gendered phenomenon here. Young Romanian women say the Shahada and embrace Islam in a higher number than men; some of the local Muslim organizations' representatives would explain that this is due to a simple demographic reality.

Islam is a  rather atypical religion for the local spiritual landscape, which is dominated by Orthodox Christians (86.7% of the population). Carrying their religious identity most visibly trough the veil, female converts experience conflicts with their old selves, with their families, sometimes with society at large, which finds different and not always subtle ways of sanctioning their religious shift.

This blog is an attempt to put together the pieces in the puzzle of my PhD research, concerning the role of the headscarf in shaping Romanian converts' identity. Despite the fact that the topic of Muslim female covering has been highly exploited for the profit of political agendas and has been receiving an overwhelming attention in the worldwide media, I chose it as a practical instrument leading to other salient issues in these women's lives: their personal and professional aspirations, the values they adopted from Islam, the negotiation of their new religious selves with those code enforcers that attempt to judge and hinder them. I use the veil as a metonymy for the whole being-a-Romanian-Muslim-woman experience.

Since Islam is now a global presence, this research is connected to the international context - this is also the reason for writing in English - while trying at the same time to draw a profile of a Romanian Muslim female identity.

I am also offering this blog as a platform open to  the converts who want to give voice to their experience of being Muslims in Romania. Maybe this is a good opportunity for those interested  to talk about themselves in an environment created by a non-Muslim, as  a part of an academic project - which cannot come to reality without them making their mark on it.

Until present, I've been conducting biographic interviews with Romanian female converts and each time I was amazed by their life stories. They are all educated women who chose a faith path and stood up for what they believe in, no matter what,  and I am thankful to know them all.

For those of you who see your identity projected in this spiritual profile, I launch a first question: 

What do you love about being a Muslim woman?

The floor is yours now!